The big internet companies are keeping more traffic on their sites rather than referring it to yours.
Depending on social media platforms to send traffic to your website or to even give you exposure can be a losing game. All of the companies that asked people to follow them on Facebook got burned many years ago when Facebook started throttling who saw their posts.
Writing on his company blog last week, SEO expert Rand Fishkin pointed out that it’s getting worse. And it’s not limited to social media platforms. Even Google is keeping more traffic on its site rather than referring it to other sites.
What can you do? Rand has a number of suggestions, which essentially boil down to doing a bit of everything.
My take is that it’s important that you’re producing content on your own domain name and website. Your domain is yours and is a direct link to your audience. While social media platforms and search engines can change how much traffic they’re sending your way, visitors will often return to the same high-quality website without going through an intermediary like Google. Focus on the direct traffic your site gets in addition to search, social and referral visitors.
It helps if you have a short, easy-to-remember domain name to make it easier for your audience to return to your website.
Read Rand’s analysis (with data) here.
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